New visitor center at Plum Island

If a bite from a greenhead fly has ever set you pondering over the pesky insect's purpose in the grand scheme of things, a trip to the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge near Newburyport, Massachusetts, will provide an answer to that and other questions about coastal ecology. Environmental education is the focus of a new visitor center at the refuge that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service expects to open to the public by early autumn.

“It's going to be a wonderful facility,” Janet Kennedy, refuge manager, said of the energy efficient “green” building that houses a multipurpose classroom, auditorium, exhibit area and native plant garden.

The center's educational programs and exhibits are designed to help people better experience the refuge, Kennedy added. Occupying six miles [9.6 kilometers] of Plum Island, a barrier island on the north shore of Massachusetts, the refuge contains beach, marsh and wetland habitat, and supports more than 300 species of birds and other wildlife.

The center's education program will focus on the conservation of the piping plover, a threatened species that flocks to the refuge each spring to nest, Kennedy said.

For the past two years, refuge staff have been coordinating the Junior Plover Warden Program to help students understand, appreciate and protect plovers and their habitat. Students are taught about the life cycle of plovers in the classroom and visit the shore to observe nesting birds. They also work on fun projects that give them a bird’s-eye view of the world, such as building nests on the beach that resemble plover nests.

As the program grows, Kennedy would like to see it extend to children from beyond the Newburyport area and possibly to urban audiences.

Exhibits at the center will teach adults and children alike about the plovers and other migratory birds that use the refuge, according to Erin Loury, an ECO associate who worked on the exhibits. (ECO is an environmental careers development organization that offers internships to students.) Through displays and videos, visitors will have the opportunity to learn about other wildlife, fish, insects and plants that constitute the marsh ecosystem, and about the natural forces that form the island's dunes. Other exhibits will give a historical perspective showing how people have used Plum Island over time, from salt marsh haying to bird watching.

After touring the center, visitors will leave knowing how they can become involved in protecting the refuge's natural resources, Kennedy said.

     - Maureen Kelly

Herring: Caught in a perfect storm?

Any way you look at it, it's been a bad year for river herring in the Gulf of Maine, and particularly in Massachusetts, where there are 100 fish runs, all of them disastrously low, according to Michael Armstrong, anadromous fish manager for the state's Division of Marine Fisheries in Gloucester. The problem is not new: the decline has been ongoing for the past five years, but was far more pronounced this year.

“The bottom has dropped out,” Armstrong said. He attributes the fallout of herring to a number of factors, not the least of which were the cold temperatures and high water flows in April to May of this year when the fish should have been running. The temperatures were 5 to10 degrees Fahrenheit colder than normal. Normal temperatures trigger herring to spawn. Other factors in the decline include heavy predation by striped bass, bait use and herring bycatch. “It's pretty much a perfect storm of all these factors,” said Armstrong.

Much of the herring count is anecdotal because of the high number of alewife and blueback herring runs in the state and because Armstrong is the lone biologist monitoring them. But across the state the runs are down 50 to 80 percent. In the Monument River in Bourne, for example, the number of alewife herring declined to 100,000 this year from 160,000 last year, and 600,000 ten years ago. The Merrimack River, which used to have hundreds of thousands of herring in the late 1980s, had 99 this year, Armstrong said.

It isn't clear what happens when the herring don't come to the rivers to spawn. They may stay in the offshore waters and either not spawn or resorb their eggs and wait until the following season to return. Even if they do come back, there's still bad news: the adult class of 2008-2009 will be very lean, and populations will drop even more.

Like most fisheries issues, the diminishing herring population is not without fingerpointing, a lot of it toward offshore fisheries. Striped bass fishing may be the biggest problem, Armstrong said, because the herring are being used as bait. However, striped bass also prey on the herring offspring so they can't reestablish themselves.

Massachusetts plans to hold public hearings in November to decide what to do about the herring declines. Armstrong said he's not sure if the bag limit will be halved from 25 fish now to 12 per day, or even if there will be a ban on taking herring.

Tasty seaweed

Japanese and other Asian cultures have long eaten seaweed as both a nutritious food staple and a tasty garnish. Now University of Maine researchers are trying to grow a local Porphyra or “nori” seaweed they hope will win over palates in New England and elsewhere and provide a new revenue source for the fishing industry in mariculture settings where it will be integrated with finfish.

The university already has seeded 30 nets with a baby domestic Porphyra umbilicalis species at the Center for Cooperative Aquaculture Research in Franklin, Maine, with the aim of placing them at the Heritage Salmon Lease Site in Cobscook Bay by early this fall. About half a million salmon already have been grown at the Heritage site, said Professor Susan Brawley of the University of Maine's School of Marine Sciences in Orono, who is spearheading the seaweed project. The University of Connecticut also is a collaborator in the project, which is being supported by Sea Grant.

The Porphyra is a red marine alga that is the most valuable sea vegetable in the world, according to the Center for Cooperative Aquaculture Research. The Japanese alone produce more than $2 billion worth a year, and the Chinese have a major industry based around production of Porphyra food products. Traditional uses of the Porphyra have spread throughout the world to include Welsh laver bread, Japanese sushi and Asian soups. Maine has at least seven native species of Porphyra.

Brawley also is working with Maine Coast Sea Vegetables as a consulting partner and local chefs to create tasty dishes that will build up demand for the New England seaweed. Some of the dishes will become part of the normal menu at the university. “We gave the chefs very little instructions, and they prepared an amazing banquet,” she said. “We need to grow a market for the seaweed crop.” The university also plans to have a promotional day later this fall.

Because China already has inexpensive production capability to produce sheets of seaweed that are used to wrap sushi and snacks, the university researchers are looking to create novel western-style products, said Nicolas Blouin, a graduate student on the project. Porphyra is a good source of protein and taurine, which has been linked to lowering cholesterol, he said. It already is popular among people who shop at health food stores.

For more information see: www.ccar.um.maine.edu/nori.html.

Toxic metal becomes ocean nutrient

Cadmium, commonly considered a toxic metal and often used in combination with nickel in batteries, has been found to be a nutrient in the ocean, according to scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) in Massachusetts. The Scientists discovered cadmium within an enzyme from a marine diatom, an algae or plankton common in the ocean and a major source of food for many organisms. This is the first known biological use of cadmium in any form of life.

Their finding, which was reported in the May 5 issue of the journal Nature, suggests that certain trace metals, found in very low concentrations in the ocean, are used by enzymes that have not been found in terrestrial organisms. And enzymes with such metals may be more common in marine than in land-based creatures. They could be important for cycling trace metals in seawater. That in turn has implications for global carbon cycling and climate change.

“This discovery provides a long-awaited explanation for the nutrient-like behavior of cadmium on the oceans,” said Mak Saito, an assistant scientist at the WHOI Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry Department, when the study was released. “This enzyme is involved in carbon uptake in diatoms, and is probably an important component of carbon cycling in the surface oceans. That has implications for our understanding of the global carbon cycle.” Saito co-authored the study.

He added that trace elements are very scarce in the ocean. Major areas of the surface oceans are limited by iron rather than by nitrogen or phosphorus as in lakes and coastal waters.

In the past few decades the importance of zinc as a micronutrient has become apparent in terrestrial life. But Saito said the scarcity of zinc in the oceans likely created the need for a cadmium enzyme that performs the same function: that of a protein that regulates carbon dioxide levels in cells. Marine diatoms can use cadmium, cobalt or zinc to grow optimally. Saito added that the ecology of phytoplankton in the oceans likely is influenced by those metals.

     - Lori Valigra

© 2005 The Gulf of Maine Times